How do I build a more diverse team?

Description

Anna Counselman, Co-Founder and Head of Operations, Upstart explains how you can improve your recruiting pipeline to build a more diverse team.

Video Transcript

How do I build a more diverse team?

I think the first thing is to be aware that you’re trying to deliberately build more diversity into your teams and ask that that happens in your pipeline. If you are looking to fill an important position, you can make an explicit goal to say like, okay, 25% of the candidates have to be women minorities etc. Put that job to your recruiting team or recruiter that you’re working with, things like that. I think, if you do a reasonably good job on the pipeline, the best candidates will naturally be diverse.

I think we’re companies fall short is, you know, they look at a limited pool of candidates, they call it a day and then you end up with, some skewed bias because you happen to tap into like a very narrow network or something like that. I’m into having objective and measurable goals and so you certainly can’t make a goal to hire a woman for this position because that might not be the right decision, ultimately you have to hire the best person, not the best woman, but if you could say, okay, I want x percent of candidates to be diverse, I think that will naturally lead to building diversity in your company.